The merging of Langston Hughes, Ice-T, jazz, and art.

In 1987, Ice-T could lay claim to one first in music history: the first explicit warning label on an album.

In 1992, the country was aflutter over his song 'Cop Killer.'

But in 2015, things have changed a bit. Maybe age has slowed him down, but Ice-T doesn't care for controversy so much as he cares for jazz and poetry. That doesn't mean he doesn't want to speak out about inequalities he sees in the world--he just wants to change the way he speaks about them. To do that, he's joining a jazz ensemble to recite Langston Hughes's poetry at the EFG London Jazz Festival.

Indeed, Hughes often wrote poetry with a heavy jazz influence. In 1961 he wrote 'Ask Your Mama,' a series of verse about the experience of living in America as a black person specifically to be accompanied by jazz music. Before his verses ever made the stage, Hughes died.

Now, Ice-T is taking over where Hughes left off. Musician Ron McCurdy wrote a score to Hughes's verses, but sat on the project for nearly twenty years until now--when he approached Ice-T to be the presenter of the verses as the jazz played, accompanied by art work that flashes on screen behind him.

So do the issues of the 1960s still resonate today? Ice-T tells the BBC he thinks so. "What Langston was writing is definitely still relevant--all that stuff about civil rights and poor people [...] You can go back to the '60s and you see stuff that's still going on in society now."